Fearful Symmetry

by Francis Gideon

  Fearful Symmetry

  By Francis Gideon

  When something is perfect, it sets itself up to be destroyed, and for everything gained, something is lost.

  Since Dryden was young, his mother taught him about balance. While she weaves jewelry to sell at the marketplace, Dryden learns how every unspoiled gem begs to be damaged, just like the universe corrects every misfortune.

  But with age and experience, Dryden begins to see the cracks in his mother’s naïve view of life. If she is wrong about balance, she might be wrong about the supposed beast in the woods. Dryden ventures into the forbidden, where a handsome hunter named Otto saves him from a deranged fox and seduces him. But like so much else, Otto has an unseen side, and if Dryden wants to regain his freedom and break Otto’s spell, he’ll have to answer three riddles in three days.

  With the help of his mother’s stories and the fox who once threatened him, Dryden must beat the monster and restore balance to his world. But it will come at a cost.

  For Travis

  Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

  In the forests of the night;

  What immortal hand or eye,

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  William Blake, “The Tyger”

  Prologue

  EVER SINCE Dryden was small, his mother told him stories. As he grew up, Dryden realized these stories also hid rules about the world.

  “Never go into the woods past a certain point,” his mother told Dryden one night.

  “What point? How will I know?”

  “You’ll know. Woods don’t organize themselves by men’s logic. Trees only grow where their seeds are dropped. Anything with order, precision, and balance, you know someone was there.”

  Dryden looked out the front window. His father chopped wood by their small stone fence. Each rock in the fence was piled up and cobbled together. There looked to be no order there, in spite of what his mother told him. But when Dryden gazed closer, like his mother often told him to do when he was unsure, he didn’t see the rocks anymore. He saw the cement paste in between the rocks, all of it only a half an inch thick. There was order in that, a consistency all the way through. Men didn’t build the rocks, Dryden noted, but they did build the fence.

  Dryden glanced past the rocks toward the dirt road that branched off from their small house. There were more houses, small cabins like his mother and father’s, down a few miles from them. Other families lived there with a young baby and a set of twin girls. The woods lined the back of Dryden’s house and went on for even longer than the dirt roads. Brambles marked the front of the forest, along with tall grasses and ferns.

  “Someone had to get here first,” Dryden stated, turning back toward his mother. “Someone had to get through the woods to build the houses. It was all woods here not long ago.”

  His mother looked up from her work. She sat on a large, deep red-velvet chair in the front of their living area. The chair was probably the most expensive item in their house, aside from what his mother worked with. Stones in an array of colors were laid out before her, along with hemp and wire for crafting jewelry. Each afternoon and well into evening, after the chores of the day were done, Dryden’s mother did her other job and made jewelry for those who wanted it. Mostly the nobles far beyond the cottage walls were her paying customers, but there were a few families that frequented the marketplace who could afford it and thought his mother’s work beautiful.

  “You’re right,” she stated. “Someone had to walk through the woods in order to build the first house so that one day we could live there. Someone also had to create what was dangerous.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you create something, you also take something away.” She pulled up a piece of hemp as she spoke, threading on a blue stone, followed by a purple one, then ending in red. “The world will always try to balance itself. Even in something as simple as colors.”

  She held up her work across her throat, smiling brightly, before she went on. “When you create a house, you fill it with life. But the house walls also must protect you from something too. So you create a beast.”

  The hair on Dryden’s neck stood up. “That’s what’s out there? A beast?”

  “A beast that used to be human. Who created this town. That’s why he’s so dangerous, because he used to be good.”

  Dryden’s eyes went back to his father chopping wood. Each thwack of the blade against the grain echoed in his ears. “So I can go into the woods, just not past a certain point?”

  “Don’t tempt fate, Dryden.”

  “I’m not.” Dryden turned toward his mother again, her eyes almost violet as she stared back. “I’m curious.”

  “No. You’re poking yourself into all the holes to see if you can balance the world when the world always takes care of itself. Sometimes, there are flaws we cannot figure out, and it is not our job to figure them out.” She poked a finger through a too big loop inside her hemp necklace and then kept going along in her stitch work. Dryden twitched a bit, seeing the flaw. If his mother held the necklace up again, the sides would no longer match. At least, Dryden thought, there is the purple stone at the center to distract.

  “Now,” his mother spoke again. “Don’t go into the woods. Don’t go off the path. Don’t follow the noise that leads you farther. And don’t make deals.” She smirked. “There is nothing more fearful than symmetry, Dryden. The more you can push against that impulse, the better. And if you can’t remember that—just remember me.”

  Dryden didn’t have time to ask another question before his father called his name.

  “Dryden?” He coughed and wheezed before each breath. “Come out and help me. We need to keep your mother warm.”

  “Be right there.”

  As Dryden helped his father with the wood, piling it by the stove, he tried to ignore the rattle that persisted inside his father’s chest. His father seemed to get older and older by the day. Dryden wondered whether he could survive through the winter.

  “I think,” his mother stated, touching the purple stone on the necklace again, “that this one I’ll keep for myself.”

  Dryden’s father, having run out of his voice for the day, didn’t argue with Dryden’s mother. As his father stoked the fire with the newly cut wood, Dryden sat on the small wooden chair by his mother’s large red one. She passed him a bundle of hemp strings that hadn’t been threaded yet, along with a small pile of yellow stones.

  “Your father got these for me, you know. The yellow is so beautiful, don’t you think?”

  Dryden glanced back toward his father, but he didn’t respond. He was tucked away at the kitchen table, his head pillowed on his arms. Dryden turned back to the yellow gems, so bright they were like sunlight in his hands. He started to weave the hemp together, following the pattern his mother often used. She watched over Dryden for the first few stitches, then leaned happily back into her seat.

  “One day,” she declared, “I’ll die, and you will take over for me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I take over for Dad?”

  His mother smiled but never answered the question. It should have been clear why Dryden would weave hemp necklaces and not chop wood. His hands were soft, and his eyes were bright. His mind was geared for creation and thinking, not hard labor; he had already read through their book collection several times over, and his mother was always planning on adding more to fuel Dryden’s knowledge. He could see colors the same way his mother could, and he knew how to find patterns in something that was once string and wire. Even at nine years old, he was already doing so well now with the yellow gems that there was only so much more he could learn.

  “You finish my work for the day,” she said, patting Dryden’s shoulder. “I’ll
cook dinner.”

  Dryden nodded as his mother left him. He eyed her red chair and the velvet on it, but he knew better than to ask if he could sit in her spot. He pulled over a footstool and laid out the rest of her jewels and patterns from the afternoon. Dryden threaded orange stones with red and yellow at their sides. He took copper wire and wound it around an opal, so the sunlight glinted off the metal just right and lit up their small living room. He worked late into the evening, until his mother eventually placed his dinner by his side and left him alone to work through the night.

  Even as snow began to fall and autumn turned into winter, Dryden’s father kept chopping wood while his mother prepared a sheep for dinner. On the cutting block, she pinned the sheep’s legs back and pulled out what was inside. Dryden felt sick to his stomach hearing the clink of metal and bone, followed by an ax and wood. He tried to will it away as he worked on her jewelry, but his mother’s actions only became louder and louder. It was then that he realized she was trying to tell him a different story. Not about the precious stones so much as the sheep’s body, too.

  “What do you need?” Dryden asked. “Do you want my help?”

  “Yes.” His mother smiled. With a cleaver in her hand, she sliced away the flanks and placed them on a wooden cutting board. She removed what was left of the intestines and added them to a separate block, too. After what seemed like forever, his mother finally pulled out a tiny organ and handed it to Dryden.

  “By the window,” she said. “Place this on the sill.”

  The small organ felt hollow in his hand and left his fingers stained red. “What’s this for?”

  “The balance.”

  “I thought you said the universe took care of itself?”

  “It does. But you must feed the darkness, just a little bit, or beware of the consequences.”

  “The consequences?” Dryden placed the organ on the windowsill, just outside of the frame. The blood stained the snow around it, creating the same deep red color as the chair. After washing up, Dryden sat back down with the beads, though he could still feel the sting of blood on his hands. “You mean the beast? Is that for the beast?”

  “No.”

  When she didn’t explain further, Dryden stayed quiet and unmoved.

  She sighed, touching the purple stone she still wore against her throat. “I told you all this already, Dryden. You must listen to me carefully.”

  “You told me not to go into the woods. But this has nothing to do with woods.”

  “Fine. I will say it again, in a form you recognize.”

  She placed the cleaver down on the table and then wiped blood on her apron. She held the fabric out from her body, then chuckled. “A-hah! See the stain? It’s easy to mark up something perfect. Hard to keep something good. Like this necklace I wear, like—”

  “But you ruined the necklace,” Dryden cut in.

  “Exactly. I left the mistake so the universe would supply.”

  Dryden shook his head. “I still don’t understand.”

  “I told you before not to go into the woods past a certain point because a beast lives there, right?”

  “Yes. The man who made the town.”

  “Yes. Good.” She paused. “He is a smaller part of a larger organism. The world is a tree, Dryden. The branches on the top stretch out for what’s good—but the roots at the bottom reach down far below toward dirt and destruction. There is the high and the low, the good and the bad. But people often forget about the trunk of this tree, and they let it go hollow. The roots and the branches support life, both the good and the bad, but if you leave out the middle, your life doesn’t work. The tree needs the middle to support itself. That is where we live—and people just like us. We are the center of the whole.”

  “And people forget about us?”

  “Yes. Because it’s always better to strive for something else. The beast—the man in the woods—he started out in the middle of life, too. He started out as a hard-working person with some luxuries. He merely forgot who he really was and became hollow inside.” His mother paused and then shivered as if a chill had passed through the room. “I tell you not to go into the woods, Dryden, because I want you to be safe from him. But I tell you this part of the story because I don’t want you to become him. You can’t forget where you come from, Dryden. We are always the people in the middle.”

  Dryden paused. He was used to his mother talking like this, but her words had a distinct weight to them this time around that made Dryden uncomfortable. He looked down at the jewelry he had been making all this week. Each model was perfect with a stone in the right place. As he pulled his hands away from the piece he was currently working on, he blinked and saw bloody fingerprints. When he blinked again, the fingerprints were gone—but it was too late. He dropped the piece with a shudder, the white stone at the center cracking when it hit the ground.

  His mother sighed, but not in anger. She picked up the fallen jewelry and passed it back to him, rubbing off the blood—but leaving the crack—as she did. “Nature does not like it if you outdo her. She will balance you, like she did here. But if you make the error, the universe will fill it in with something good. Someone will buy this, Dryden, even though there is a crack. They will want it more because of this.”

  “But why? Beauty has to be perfect.”

  “No. It doesn’t. People love what reminds them of themselves, of what makes them human. And perfection is not human.” Her eyes lingered on Dryden’s father, whose cough rattled inside the walls of the house. For a moment, Dryden wondered if his mother kept his father sick so she could sacrifice something good for her own success. When her violet eyes crinkled and her face softened as he coughed again, Dryden forgot the thought. His mother turned back to him.

  “If you try to achieve perfection, then the universe will destroy it. That is the lesson of my stories, Dryden. That is why I keep what’s broken and why, so far, we have been so lucky.”

  Dryden went back to making jewelry. It was hard to destroy what he had finally made look good, but eventually, he got used to it. His mother continued to chop up the sheep’s body for their dinner that night.

  “What does the beast look like?” Dryden asked.

  “He is hollow inside,” she said. “That is all I know.”

  “From making bad deals?”

  “Probably.” His mother nodded. “And from wanting everything that’s beautiful. You can’t have that, Dryden. No one ever can.”

  When his father came back inside, all stories ceased. He added firewood to the stove and then smiled at Dryden’s mother. Her purple necklace shone in the bright sunlight, and as Dryden looked closer, he noticed a bloody fingerprint on its center too. Dryden wanted to fix it, to tell his mother, but he knew she would only cultivate the stain instead of wash it away.

  After a few more nights of stories about the woods, Dryden forgot the bloodstain was there. As both he and his mother continued to make jewelry, Dryden learned not to see the flaws. For a long time afterward, Dryden knew it was easier to pretend he didn’t see anything at all.

  Chapter One

  DRYDEN’S MOTHER kept making jewelry, always with at least one flaw. Throughout the long winters, she would weave and bead, eventually filling up their small living room with piles of beautiful colors that no one but her—and Dryden now—could touch. His father continued to chop wood with the rattle in his chest. For a decade, Dryden forgot that the stories were there; they faded into the background and became more of a memory than a warning.

  One morning, soon after Dryden turned nineteen, he woke to find that his mother’s treasure trove of necklaces, bracelets, and rings were gone. It’s the first of spring, he thought, and now the markets are open for her. Dryden swept the floor to free it from debris, collecting the stray bits of wire and twine in his pockets as he did so. His father woke soon after he had completed the floors.

  “Where is Adrina?” he asked, coughing afterward.

  “She’s at the market. Spring’s her
e.”

  His father nodded, then looked outside at the woods. “Can you chop today?”

  “Of course.”

  His father’s gaze lingered on him, before he went back into the bedroom. As soon as Dryden was sure his father was asleep, he took out the small bits of stones and wire he had collected. It wasn’t much—a few red rocks, copper wire, and lots of hemp—but Dryden had been studying with his mother for some time now. He knew how to make something beautiful from much less. And now that his mother’s violet eyes weren’t overseeing his own, he could make whatever he wanted and however he wished.

  In less than an hour, Dryden had turned the pile of debris into a bracelet. Too big for most of the women that they usually served, but it fit perfectly around his wrist. In the center, he had placed the red stone, which had been rounded on both ends to form a heart. Copper branched out from the stone, making it shine like a sacred heart Dryden had once seen on a religious painting. The hemp pieces held the display together and tied easily around his wrist. This piece was big, and so wonderful to Dryden’s eyes, and easily the most beautiful piece he had ever seen, let alone made himself. He paused for a moment, admiring it on his wrist, before he slipped the stone facedown and hid the bracelet inside his sleeve. He could not let anyone see this bracelet—and surely not his mother. She would make him destroy an edge, rip out a bead, or something else to ruin it.

  Only after gazing at the piece one last time did Dryden go out to chop wood. The morning wore on and warmed up as the sun came over the skyline. After Dryden had chopped everything into neat piles, he went back inside to find the cabin eerily quiet. His mother hadn’t yet returned, and for the first time in years, Dryden did not hear his father’s cough.

  “Father?” Dryden stood in the hallway, outside the cracked door. “Father?”

  He waited and called once more but heard nothing. Inside his parents’ bedroom, Dryden found his father faceup on the bed. His eyes were closed, and his skin was pale. Dead. Dryden froze in place. In many ways, he knew this moment would come. But knowing something and feeling it were two different things. Grief filled his body, making his chest hurt and his lungs ache with each breath. He didn’t cry, not fully in this moment. He closed the door and paced the hallway of the cottage. His thoughts careened in his head, sharper than a knife. He could feel the cool swell of the stone heart on his wrist and the dull thud of his own heart. Each beat was like a curse. I have caused this, I have caused this, I have caused this. Dryden repeated the refrain with each breath, each step. And now the world says I have to pay.